DISTANCE CEPTORS EMOTIONS 119 



is by means of distance ceptor stimulation that most 

 herd and community adaptations are affected adap- 

 tations which were evolved, as Sherrington and others 

 have shown, simultaneously with the power of loco- 

 motion. 



Integration of the animal is achieved no less by 

 the inhibition of these locomotor acts than by the 

 consummation of them. A dog standing rigid and 

 alert pointing game ; a cat stalking a bird ; or a hare 

 fleeing before hounds, is each in like manner activated 

 through its distance ceptors to assume a posture or a 

 series of postures of the body, in which not one but 

 all parts of the skeletal musculature are concerned. 

 Whether it be to impel locomotion or to cut it short, 

 therefore, the animal as a whole is activated through 

 the stimulation of its distance ceptors. 



As there is no break in the automatic continuity 

 of action between the incidence of the adequate stimu- 

 lus for a muscular reflex and the production of a pro- 

 tective motor act specific to that stimulus, so there is 

 no break between the incidence of the environmental 

 stimulus upon the distance ceptors and the motor activ- 

 ity which is the end effect of that stimulus. The flight 

 of the giant water buffalo at the sight of a lion, or the 

 charge of the lion at the sight of its prey, is as automatic 

 a reaction as is the withdrawal of the limb of a rabbit 

 from the sharp prick of a thorn. The delicate record- 

 ing mechanisms of the eye, the ear and the nose, which 

 were evolved to receive and transmit to the brain the 

 specific impulses of a certain range of light waves, 

 of sound waves and of material emanations, meet in 

 the brain other mechanisms equally delicate and labile. 



